Those Wasted Years
by Guardian Spirit
Summary: It's one of the biggest shocks of Rhett's life and he wishes desperately that he didn't care.


**A/N: This is my first ever foray into Gone With the Wind fanfiction, so I apologize if it's somewhat lacking. I didn't mean for my first fic in this fandom to be angsty (or this short!), but if you ask anyone in my previous fandoms, that's sort of my way. I hope you're all able to enjoy it, at least! Now onward to the angst~**

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><p>Scarlett dies first.<p>

It's one of the biggest shocks of Rhett's life. He always assumed he'd go first, long, long before the gray even started to show in her hair. He was older. It made sense.

It's 6 years after their separation that he hears it; not from family or close personal friends, but a stranger, some passerby that doesn't know him. She couldn't possibly know him for the words that come so easily to her mouth, words that aren't even directed at him: Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler is dead. It hits him harder than he would expect 6 years later. Six years, countless women, and a scar on his heart that has never quite healed. Pride has done a lot of things for him, but it has never quelled the ache that he expected time to fix. It has made him hard and resentful. It has made him miserable.

He doesn't attend the funeral. He doesn't visit her grave, because a small, infuriating part of him decides that if he doesn't see it for himself, then it's all lies. Hearsay. If there isn't a grave then Scarlett is alive somewhere. It is easier to continue to avoid her because he's angry than to reconcile the idea that he doesn't have a choice in the matter anymore, that there's no Scarlett to see, that if he chose to go back to her one day it wouldn't even matter. He can't search for her when she is nowhere to be found.

(And once again, he thinks, Rhett Butler is a fan of lost causes.)

He thinks about the last time he saw her. It was a few months ago in Virginia, of all places. He was there on business. The carriage took him through a bustling main street, past unfamiliar crowds, sounds and smells. It was then that he saw her standing outside a shop, bending at the hip to inspect something he could not see. Maybe a hat. A dress. Something offensive and gaudy, a waste of his hard earned money. She'd probably wear it around Atlanta to make the other women angry. That would be just like her, not caring for the feelings or opinions of others.

In retrospect, Rhett thinks, Scarlett looked tired. In retrospect she looked too thin, her eyes sunken into her face, skin chalky and much too pale. If he had thought for more than a moment about it he would have realized something was wrong, but Rhett has made a painfully good living out of detached aloofness and he wasn't about to give it up then. If he had thought for more than a moment about her it might have shown on his face and then Scarlett would have known. She would have seen with her own two eyes how he could never truly be rid of her, not in the capacity that he wanted or pretended to be. A lifetime of never caring about any woman in particular and suddenly he's following Scarlett O'Hara around like an obedient dog for the rest of it. That sort of feeling never goes away, not really. Life certainly goes on, Rhett's life has gone on, but there's a distinctly Scarlett shaped hole in his heart that will never be filled by anyone else no matter the cajoling or force fitting.

(For everything she has done to him, he hates her for this the most. He hates her for making him love her and for being so naive as to not even recognize it. She has made him weak and needy, half the man he used to be and now he sits in bars and stares at women because suddenly he wants a wife instead of a quick fuck. Suddenly he wants romance and shared dreams and all of these stupid things that he never wanted before. Things that he can't even have now, because they only ever mattered with Scarlett.)

Scarlett dies first, the bitch, and Rhett spends the next 22 years of his life slowly dying of a broken heart.


End file.
